History of Sexuality

What Hacker News says

1. Der_EinzigeSep 2022
   Go read Foucault's "A history of sexuality". He spends the whole world debunking the idea that the victorian's were especially sexually prudes.

   He spends the majority of the work trying to figure out why modern people are still convinced that the victorian's were uniquely prudish. He thinks this belief is deeply connected to many other strange sexual beliefs.

   I think Foucault is frequently overrated but at least volume 1 of a history of sexuality is pretty neat.

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2. abhiyerraOct 2019
   Power / Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and History of Sexuality were huge influences in my thinking about the world and how to think about life itself as a system with power being the interconnect. I highly recommend it to understand how culture/subcultures behave and it ends up becoming in a sense graph theory.
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3. nkurzMay 2019
   It's a great quote, but having (tried) to read (some of) all of those authors (in English translation), I think Foucault is in a different class. I'd agree that the others are intentionally obscurantist, but Foucault is not. I'd put him at about the level of Chomsky himself --- complicated, possibly wrong, but insightful and striving for clarity.

   "Discipline and Punishment" and "History of Sexuality" are short and clear. Foucault's basic idea of "power" is that one should pay less attention to the explanations and excuses that are given, and more attention to what actually happens. If despite their protestations, one side consistently ends up winning, and their opponents consistently end up losing, it's likely that they hold "power".

   Which is to say, while you are welcome to skip Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and Kristeva, I think you should read Foucault.

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4. abhiyerraFeb 2019
   Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd,History of Sexuality by Foucault, Methophors to Live By by Lakoff

   All of these portray the world as a series of systems. First deals with interconnected systems like war, business, conflict, the second the notion that culture itself is a series of systems of power and sexuality has been used as a system of power, and third that most of our thought can be made from simpler set of blocks i.e metaphors from which we construct almost all of existence.

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5. jccalhounFeb 2019
   History of Sexuality part 1 Michel Foucault puts for the repressive hypothesis which I find myself thinking about a lot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality

   The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Erving Goffman uses the metaphor of theater to explain how we perform roles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Ev...

   I would say How to Do Things With Words by JL Austin which talks about the power of words to bring things into existence but it really gets into too much detail for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Austin#How_to_Do_Things_...

   Similarly Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau-Ponty really influenced me but it is really really really long and dense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_of_Perception

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6. kolbeMar 2018
   History of Sexuality by Foucault is like the first real text on it. Infinite Jest is decent, too. Sapiens, in its own way. The whole cannon of postmodern literature.
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