Human sexuality is how people experience the erotic and express themselves as sexual beings. Frequently driven by the desire for sexual pleasure, human sexuality has biological, physical and emotional aspects. Biologically, it refers to the reproductive mechanism as well as the basic biological drive that exists in all species and can encompass sexual intercourse and sexual contact in all its forms. Emotional aspects deal with the intense emotions relating to sexual acts and associated social bonds. Physical issues around sexuality range from purely medical considerations to concerns about the physiological or even psychological and sociological aspects of sexual behaviour.
The term can also cover cultural, political, legal and philosophical aspects. It may also refer to issues of morality, ethics, theology, spirituality or religion and how they relate to all things sexual. Recent studies on human sexuality have highlighted that sexual aspects are of major importance in building up personal identity and in the social evolution of individuals:
Human sexuality is not simply imposed by instinct or stereotypical conducts, as it happens in animals, but it is influenced both by superior mental activity and by social, cultural, educational and normative characteristics of those places where the subjects grow up and their personality develops. Consequently, the analysis of sexual sphere must be based on the convergence of several lines of development such as affectivity, emotions and relations.
Deleuze and Guattari, in their 1972 classic Anti-Oedipus, discussed how sexuality is a powerful force that invests all the social activities:
Familialism maintains that sexuality operates only in the family [...] the truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a business causes money to circulate; the way the burgeoise fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metemorphoses. Hitler gave the fascists a hard-on. Flags, nations, armies, banks give a lot of people hard-ons.
Art and artifacts from past eras help to portray human sexuality of the time.
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