Sexual Attraction: The Psychology of Allure

(Paperback, NIPPOD)

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How and why does sexual attraction happen This book is an exploration of the universal yet highly individualized experience of being sexually attracted to another person. Incorporating interviews, research findings, and excerpts from romantic and erotic literature, lyrics, and film, Sexual Attraction: The Psychology of Allure explores a subject that is central to the human experience and highly relevant not only in personal, intimate interactions but also other relationships as well. Although the causes and effects of sexual attraction have been studied, sexual attraction itselfhow we experience others in terms of their sexual attractivenessremains a neglected, rarely researched topic. Scholar James Giles presents jargon-free information that is accessible and fascinating to the general reader as well as highly useful and informative to students and researchers in social psychology, sexology, sex and marital therapy, and relationship counseling. The book explores subjects such as how sexual attraction is fundamentally different from other forms of interpersonal attraction and how at the heart of sexual attraction lies the experience of alluresomething that makes one feel helplessly drawn towards an intimate physical joining with the sexually attractive person. The allure of strangers, cross-sex friends, sexual friends ("friends with benefits"), and romantic partners are all addressed, revealing the often subtle heterosexual attraction that typically exists between males and females in all their relationships, including between those who are ostensibly "just friends."

Reviews

Overall, this short book is an easy read that should be of interest to most sexologists. It should be accessible to a wide nonexpert audience. The author offers several intriguing hypotheses about the nature of sexual attraction. * PsycCRITIQUES *
James Giles's Sexual Attraction: The Psychology of Allure makes a unique, interesting, and much-needed journey into blending an existing body of social scientific research with humanistic ways of knowing that includes experiential, non-empirical qualitative methods as well as original philosophic inquiry and excerpts from film, literature, and music. The resulting volume provides many good considerations for those who do empirical sexuality and relationship research as well as insights into ideas that would be difficultif not impossibleto explore through traditional research methods. * Relationship Research News *

Author Bio

James Giles, PhD, is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge Institute for Continuing Education.