In a decades-old article, Robert Solomon criticizes the “liberal American sexual mythology” found in the work of Tom Nagel: “His analysis is cautious and competent, but absolutely sexless. His Romeo and Juliet exemplify at most a romanticized version of the initial phases of (hetero-)sexual attraction in a casual and innocent pick-up. They ‘arouse’ each other, but there is no indication to what end. They ‘incarnate each other as flesh,’ in Sartre’s awkward but precise terminology, but Nagel gives us no clue as to why they should indulge in such a peculiar activity. Presumably a pair of dermatologists or fashion models might have a similar effect on each other, but without the slightest hint of sexual intention. What makes this situation paradigmatically sexual? We may assume, as we would in a Doris Day comedy, that the object of this protracted arousal is sexual intercourse, but we are not told this. Sexuality without content. Liberal sexual mythology takes this Hollywood element of ‘leave it to the imagination’ as its starting point and adds the equally inexplicit suggestion that whatever activities two consenting adults choose as the object of their arousal and its gratification is ‘their business.’ In a society with such secrets, pornography is bound to serve a radical end as a vulgar valve of reality. In a philosophical analysis that stops short of the very matter investigated, a bit of perverseness may be necessary just in order to refocus the question.”

Further on, he questions why Nagel would consider what he calls “unadorned sexual intercourse” as the paradigm of sexuality:

“what is it that makes intercourse the paradigm of sexual activity-its biological role in conception, its heterosexuality, its convenience for mutual orgasm? Would Nagel’s drama still serve as a sexual paradigm if Juliet turns out to be a virgin, or if Romeo and Juliet find that they are complementarily sado-masochistic, if Romeo is in drag, if they are both knee-fetishists? Why does Nagel choose two strangers? Why not, as in the days of sexual moralism, a happily married couple enjoying their seventh anniversary? Or is not the essence of sex, as Sartre so brutally argues, Romeo and Juliet’s mutual attempts to possess each other, with each’s own enjoyment only a secondary and essentially distracting effect? Are we expected to presume the most prominent paradigm, at least since Freud, the lusty ejaculation of Romeo into the submissive, if not passive, Juliet? Suppose Juliet is in fact a prostitute, skillfully mocking the signs of innocent arousal: is this a breach of the paradigm, or might not such subsequent ‘unadorned’ intercourse be just the model that Nagel claims to defend?”

Nearly forty years on, after decades of obsessive attention to the body, have we made any progress?