The Transformation of Intimacy Quotes

“No one knows whether at the global level a framework of democratic institutions will develop, or whether alternatively world politics will slide into a destructiveness that might threaten the entire planet. Nobody knows if sexual relationships will become a wasteland of impermanent liaisons, marked by emotional antipathy as much as by love, and scarred by violence. There are good grounds for optimism in each case, but in a culture that has given up providentialism futures have to be worked for against a background of acknowledged risk.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“La comunicación de los sentimientos, además, no es en sí ni por sí misma suficiente para la intimidad. En la medida en que tal comunicación está ligada con el narcisismo, se trata de una oferta de poder más que de una contribución al desarrollo del amor confluente.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“Una adicción es una incapacidad de colonizar el futuro y, en cuanto tal, realiza una transgresión de las primeras preocupaciones con las que deben lidiar reflexivamente los individuos.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“The ... conditions of democracy in the public sphere ... bear very directly upon the democratisation of personal life. Violent and abusive relationships are common in the sexual domain and between adults and children. Most such violence comes from men and is directed towards beings weaker than themselves. As an emancipatory ideal of democracy, the prohibition of violence is of basic importance. Coercive influences in relationships, however, obviously can take forms other than physical violence. Individuals may be prone, for example, to engage in emotional or verbal abuse of one another; marriage, so the saying goes, is a poor substitute for respect. Avoidance of emotional abuse is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the equalising of power in relationship; but the guiding principle is clearly respect for the independent views and personal traits of the other.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“Sexual emancipation, I think, can be the medium of a wide-ranging emotional reorganisation of social life. The concrete meaning of emancipation in this context is not, however, as the sexual radicals proposed, a substantive set of psychic qualities or forms of behaviour. It is more effectively understood in a procedural way, as the possibility of the radical democratisation of the personal. Who says sexual emancipation, in my view, says sexual democracy. It is not only sexuality at stake here. The democratisation of personal life, as a potential, extends in a fundamental way to friendship relations and, crucially, to the relations of parents, children, and other kin.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“Sexuality is a terrain of fundamental political struggle and also a medium of emancipation, just as the sexual radicals claimed. A non-repressive society ... would be one in which sexuality is increasingly freed from compulsiveness. Emancipation thus presumes autonomy of action in the context of the generalisation of plastic sexuality. It is separate from permissiveness in so far as it creates an ethics of personal life which makes possible a conjunction of happiness, love, and respect for others.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies