title: Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body--New Paths to Power and Love
author: Riane Eisler
description: Eisler's <i>Chalice and the Blade</i> (1987) has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, proving her own assertion that people are hungry for fresh perspectives on the human condition. In her new book, the bold paradigm-challenger continues her quest for a more comprehensive understanding of the cultural, spiritual, and political forces that drive us by exploring the complex realm of intimate relationships and posing some startling questions about our attitudes toward pain and pleasure, sex and spirituality. Why, Eisler asks, did sex, once the "sacred gift of the Goddess," become synonymous with evil? Why did veneration for women and their capacity for sustaining life change into such contempt and loathing? As Eisler traces the path of this destructive and pervasive bias, she reveals just how adverse its effect has been on every aspect of human life. Eisler makes some stunning points in this strongly argued, well-supported, and mind-stretching narrative, then urges us to imagine viable alternatives to the "sacralization of pain" and the "eroticism of violence" that stand in such stark and baffling contrast to our inherent "yearning for connection" and our aptitude for love. This is a gutsy and very important book. <i>Donna Seaman</i>
zlib_text: This book makes evident how love, as an interstitial practice, produces a set 
  of collective practices and how, through a mapping of these practices, it is 
   possible to observe the connection between the politics of sensibilities and 
  social conflict.
  The book provides – in the face of a global normalization of immediate 
  enjoyment through consumption, the internationalization of fear and anxiety, 
  the rise of “post- truth” and a distrust regarding politics – a systematic analysis of 
  love as an interstitial practice. This book follows a sociology of body/ emotions 
  approaches within which sensations, emotions and sensibilities are part of 
  dialectical social structuration process.
  The book proposes love not only as an effect or trait of a society, but also as 
  an analytical tool for better understanding the processes of social structuring. 
  It connects a sociology of bodies/emotions with a specific perspective on 
  collective action and links conflictual structures and the politics of